My first semester at Berkeley is officially over! That’s already one semester down and only seven more to go.

It’s crazy how fast time has gone by. It honestly feels like it was just yesterday that I was packing to leave my house for the next four months.

Although four months doesn’t sound like such a long time, a lot has definitely happened. And I’ve learned many things (not related to academics).

1. Food tastes better around midnight. At home, I’ve never eaten past 11 PM. And for most of the semester, I avoided Late Night. However, when I did have food super late, I realized that it tasted so much better.
2. Studying in a cafe really helps me to focus. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover this until just last week, which was Dead Week. At least I know where I’ll be spending a majority of my time studying next semester.
3. It’s so easy spending money on Amazon. Oh, the convenience. I don’t want to know how much I’ve spent on there this semester.
4. Chugging water at 5 am is a good skill to have — not for any specific reason. Haha.
5. I’m blessed with the best roommates! They sing and dance with me, they cheer me up when I’m down, they let me know if there’s a new BuzzFeed quiz that I need to take (because it’s actually really important finding out how old my soul is based on my pizza choices or how many partners I’ll have in 2017).
6. There’s a lot of birds in Berkeley. And, the fact that I have ornithophobia makes everything very difficult. It really slows down my morning commute to school, when I either have to walk far away from the birds or wait until someone else chases them away.
7. I’ll die when the time comes when I have to take 8 AMs. Even 9 AM classes were hard for me; I honestly don’t know how I used to wake up at 6 in high school.
8. I found a very legitimate way of dealing with stress — going through memes on the UC Berkeley Memes For Edgy Teens page on Facebook.

And, with that, I have finished my first semester here and am ready to take on the next one.